A Calling to Act Justly: My Spiritual Journey and the Environment

Earth Day is celebrated on April 22nd. In honor of this day, I pause for a moment to reflect on how and why my faith journey has influenced my view of the earth and my role as a caregiver. As a member of First Central Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, I was exposed to a theology and subsequent practices, which focused on being good stewards of our resources. This community and the values of my parents heavily influenced my understanding of what it means to be a caregiver for the earth. This community and many individuals taught me to not only respect, but also appreciate Mother Nature by teaching me about the remarkable complexity in its creation, our need to co-exist and the cycle of life. By actively participating in activities which focused on our role as environmental stewards with church friends and family members alike, I began to understand its value and our place in the world. Whether it was by volunteering to plant flowers in the church courtyard, cleaning up our church grounds and local neighborhood, or going on nature walks with Winston, I felt a deeper connection to the world around me. It is from these first experiences and lessons that I learned what it meant to be a steward of the earth. Over the years, my spirituality has expanded- I have weaved other religious tradition’s stories and values into my own personal spirituality and my understanding of what it means to care for the environment. For example, I have incorporated the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, which means “repairing the world.” Tikkun Olam serves as my spiritual guide and empowers me to act responsibly and ethically, especially concerning environmental issues. My faith journey, spirituality, and community gives me the courage to be an activist and helps me to make the right choices, so that I can help, even in some small way, repair the world and make it healthier for future generations.

I am so thankful for First Central’s leadership and the chance I have had to witness this faith community heed the call to act justly by taking steps to not only care for humanity, but focus on what we often take for granted, our earth. First Central has made many efforts to “go green” and support the sustainability cause. Among many things, First Central has a community garden, located in the back of the church. To learn more about this project please visit: http://www.gardenbig.org/.

To get involved, learn more about how you can live out your faith or what Omaha is doing on this front, please visit these great websites:

• Green Omaha Coalition: http://www.greenomahacoalition.org/

• Earth Day Omaha: http://www.earthdayomaha.com/ (Earth Day Omaha will be celebrated on Saturday, April 25 from 12:00- 8:00 pm)

Posted by: Hanna W.

First Central is Celebrating People in Action: Our Volunteers!

In honor of National Volunteer Week 2009- April 19-25, First Central would like to give a big shout out to all our volunteers. We are so thankful for the many hours you give to the church family. This faith community could not do it without your support, time, and talents. During this week, we celebrate the ordinary people who accomplish extraordinary things through service. Yup- that’s you. THANK YOU!

To learn more about NVW, please visit: http://www.handsonnetwork.org/programs/more/nvw

Posted by: Hanna W.

A Meditation on Easter

By: Bud Cassiday
The banners I’ve painted are an exploration of my thoughts and feelings about our celebration of Easter. What it’s all about, this death and resurrection thing? What really happened anyway? What is the significance of this Easter day? Unlike Christmas, December 25 each year, Easter is a moveable celebration. Easter is observed on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox. This can occur between March 22 and April 25. Complex negotiations over many centuries arrived at this rather odd compromise. So we’ve got this “moveable feast.”

Is the story of the Resurrection true? Is it Truth? I don’t know. I’m an artist, not a theologian. I think that many Biblical stories tell truths without being true. A friend said that Winston Baldwin once told a girl who asked if a story was true, “Honey, that story’s so true, that even if it’s not true, it’s true.” That works for me. Heresy? In some circles for sure. But whenever I hear that Jesus died for our sins, I think that it is more accurate to say that Jesus died because of the sins of his contemporaries. I don’t believe Jesus committed crucifixion suicide. He was put to death deliberately The politics of the day, and pride, arrogance, bigotry, hatred, and jealousy killed Jesus. I think that’s true.

That Easter is a moveable celebration appeals to me somehow. It moves around like the spirit can move around. And it needs to move around. Somebody kills Jesus everyday somewhere, it seems to me –genocide in Darfur or Kosovo, or innocents in the Holocaust or Guernica or New York City or Dresden, a landmine in Afghanistan or Africa, or an explosion in a town market in Iraq or the Holy Land, or a suicide bomber, or killing sprees with automatic weapons, or where a child is abused or hungry. “Broken-ness” kills Jesus. And Jesus lives and moves wherever goodness and kindness and caring prevail. I think that’s Truth.

So we are fortunate that Easter is a “moveable feast”– we desperately need the redemptive power of this celebration to move around. There are far too many places and times where this “moveable feast” is needed.
One of my favorite songs is Leonard Cohen’s, “Hallelujah.” He says the following about his song:

"This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled but there are moments when we can transcend …and reconcile and embrace the whole mess and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah'. That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say 'Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.' And you can't reconcile it in any other way except in that position of total surrender, total affirmation.”

So my color blasts, dancing figures, doves and flowers, Hallelujahs, Jesus on the Cross, and other abstracted offerings are a way to celebrate this day and this “affirmation,” as are the beautiful music we hear and joyous songs we sing and words of wisdom that come our way as we attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable.

I will celebrate the death and life of Easter and hope the miracles will move from place to place, time to time, and person to person. I want these images to be part of the celebration of the contradictions of the rational and the miraculous, of the implications of metaphors and metaphysics, and of the contemplations of the true and the Truth, and I will “embrace the thing” with surrender and affirmation. The Easter story is so true, that even if it’s not true, it’s true. Hallelujah!

Daryl’s Blog: the national church setting

Is This Any Way To Run A Church?
Well, it is how we have always done it… Sort of.


For whatever reason, First Central has a long history of involvement in the wider church—that includes the clergy, lay folk and somehow the whole congregation. Frankly I do not know how far back this tradition extends, but it pre-dates the formation of the United Church of Christ. The last national meeting of the Congregational Christian Church was held in Omaha in 1956 when the vote was taken to join with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to become the United Church of Christ the next year in Cleveland.

Currently five independent boards, each with their own corporate structures and governing boards contribute to the operation of the national board. In recent times Susan Fortina and Bill Switzer served on the Boards for World Church Ministries and Justice and Peace Ministries, respectively. I currently serve on the Executive Council (EC), the board that conducts the business of the General Synods between bi-annual meetings.

No one keeps score, but odds are we hold some sort of record for membership on the Executive Council of the UCC over the last fifty years. Don Klohr served on the first Executive Council in 1957. Ray Straun served as a lay person in the late 1980’s and was replaced by Jody Ondick-Batson. During Jody's six-year term David Ruhe became the Moderator of the General Synod and thus served with her. Winston Baldwin not only served on the EC, but came to Chair that body during the reorganization of 2000 when we restructured from eleven instrumentalities to four covenanted ministries. (Thank you Winston. How did you ever survive that?) In 2005 I replaced Winston on the EC and serve until the 2011 General Synod.

Serving on the Executive Council requires some serious familiarity with the nuances of how our strange “up-side down” polity is supposed to work—or how we wish it worked. We are not the only denomination with “congregational” polity (most Baptists and even the Missouri Synod Lutherans claim it in some form), but it can be argued that we invented it and we are certainly passionate about it. Most of our serious church discussions include a discourse about “autonomy” and “covenant” (the glue that is supposed to hold us together).

I do not yet lose much sleep about the national church’s almost forty million dollar budget, although I think about it a lot. I do spend many a late hour thinking about governance and structural problems that we have not yet solved in more than fifty years. The budget IS a real problem, but I doubt we can fix it in the direction we are going. If you see Don Klohr and I in a serious conversation, you can bet that is what we are discussing.

After more than fifty years the lines of authority and accountability for the church still do not really meet at the top! We consist of five independent legal corporations that have difficulty coordinating accounting practices, never mind acting together in visioning, planning and setting priorities for the UCC, and our constitution leaves our President and General Minister, and our Treasurer in legal ambiguity.

I have been asked to try and make sense of all of this here in this blog. It will take some explaining. I will discuss our polity, our long commitment to affirmative action and our habit of being on the leading edge of change. I also will have to explain the rapidly growing problems that we share with most other denominations as our OCWM giving continues to plummet, church attendance continues to decline across the entire spectrum, and we enter into the very different world of the post-modern church.

Next: Why we cannot seem to fix this problem.

Daryl Malena

Daryl's Blog: the national church setting

There is something new at www.ucc.org! Go to myUCC and take a look. Then create a profile (just like Facebook, but it is UCC!) and be sure to join the group "Friends of First Central." Add pictures, make comments.
Daryl Malena